By Shaenon K. Garrity

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Yes, okay, this one’s just silly. I apologize. Like I say at the end, I got this little “Mad Libs”-type self-esteem booklet at work, from some printer offering its services to Viz, and decided to solicit entries from the Narbonic mailing list.

Some weeks I was really desperate for Sunday material.

“Octarine” is a Discworld ref, of course. Dr. Vivisectus is a character from the webcomic Man-Man who actually appeared in Narbonic much later on.

Wow, I have geeky readers.

Learning new words? (In this case three, maybe, new words.) This is what kids are supposed to base their self-esteem on? I guess vocabulary is important, but I feel like the bar is set low.

We weren’t going to get through this thing without somebody using the word “defenestrate.”

Yes, somebody’s two favorite books were Pale Fire and Harriet the Spy. Don’t ask me, I just run the place.

Jeepers! Self-esteem books like that are nearly as creepy as Chick tracts. Hey – maybe that would be a good art project – a Chick Tract parody where the family saves the wayard son from Windows machines and helps him embrace Macs.

Shaenon tossed a little pamphlet with the first Skin Horse story Arc in when my Brother got me Narbonic Vol.I for my Birthday. My reaction was pretty much “Hey, it’s like a Chick Tract for awesome Webcomics!”, and so I left it in the breakroom at work.

Apparently, among some of my older colleagues, “Alphonse” used to be a slang term form an impedence-matching adapter. Apparently it came from a joke whose punchline was “Lucky old Alphonse, in the middle again!” Fortunately, I don’t know the rest of it.

At some point I named each room in my parents’ house growing up with the name of a continent. All I remember now is that the constantly-too-hot front living room was Africa and the finished basement was Australia.

It’s pages like these that I wish the comments had imported better on Sundays. Several Sundays were multiple pages, with multiple sets of comments, on WCN, but here we only get comments from the last page of each Sunday. (Which is to say, in this specific case, that I want the rest of Ed’s song.)